Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/246

the destruction of the right of property. Man cannot be a possessor, in his own right, of the soil, for a very good reason: we cannot conceive of the ownership of a thing without there existing a certain kind of proportion between the proprietor and the thing owned; and between the soil and the man none whatever can exist. In order fully to prove this, it is sufficient to observe that man is a transitory being, and land a thing which never dies or passes away. This being the case, it is contrary to human reason that the earth should become the property of man, considered individually. The institution of property is absurd if you suppress the institution of the family; for the reason of its existence must either rest in itself, or in other corporations which are similar to it, as are the religious orders. The earth, which never dies, cannot be possessed except by a religious or a family association, which, like it, never passes away. The liberal school implicitly suppresses the domestic association, the family; and it explicitly suppresses the religious association, or at least the monastic association, from which proceeds the destruction of the right of property in the soil, as a logical consequence of their principles. This destruction is so inevitably a consequence of the principles of the liberal school, that it has always signalized the period of its domination by the confiscation of the property of the Church, and by the suppression of religious institutions and the rights of primogeniture. Nor does it seem aware of the fact, that by these acts of confiscation and suppression it effects but little as regards the assertion of its principles; while, as regards its interests as a proprietor, it goes too far. The liberal school, which is far from being learned, has never understood